


Tomorrow Never Knows

by fluorescentgrey



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Fusion, Angst with a Happy Ending, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, New England, Post-Canon, Weather metaphors, colonialism is bad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-12
Updated: 2020-09-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:07:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26432410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: Monhegan Island, Maine, 1966. "This island is secretly a hotbed of hippie communists."
Relationships: B. J. Hunnicutt/Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce
Comments: 36
Kudos: 84





	Tomorrow Never Knows

When he got off the ferry, he wasn’t immediately sure what to do. They’d gone through so much fog on the way here that this could have been an alternate universe. It could even have been death. It didn’t seem entirely finished, entirely developed, like an image still congealing out of a photographic negative. He was almost intimidated enough to turn heel and get back on the boat, but instead he steeled himself and set off up the hill toward the cluster of weather-beaten grey buildings that he supposed passed for town.

He’d grown up on the California coast, but this place had a particular hardscrabble quality. The wind and sea had co-conspired to scrape and strip it to the bone like a house being gutted. The water was calm and grey, a somewhat more solid iteration of the thick fog, lapping with a kind of suspicious false innocence at the rocks ringing the shore. The dirt road up away from the lone public dock which delivered the semi-regular ferry and most of the necessities of life was quiet and eerily still in the early morning, and beyond it, even through the fog, he could see the lighthouse at the high point of the island beyond.

The road off the dock climbed steeply to the edge of a low bowl of fields and houses before the trees and brush started rising again toward the lighthouse, and there, clustered in front of a sprawling, ramshackle building encompassing rooms to let, a general store, and a laundromat, were several strange people. These people wore the oversized rubber mackintosh coats and rain boots in assorted dismal bleary colors that he had already surmised constituted the standard non-summer wardrobe of native maritime Mainers. As he got closer, he saw that one of these people was watching him. It was a tired-looking man about his own age, grey, with a deep slouch exacerbated by a very large green mac that looked war surplus. Probably when he was young the slouch had given him a kind of jovial and laconic air but now it mostly served to make him look even more tired, as though he was carrying something very heavy which could not be seen. He looked like he was watching an entire movie on sped-up film, because his face moved quickly through stages of curiosity and delight and elation and consternation and devastation and grief, but he was only watching B.J.

B.J. had worked ten years as a general practitioner at a public hospital in the Mission District. He was no stranger to witnessing another stranger’s emotional turmoil. Still, he felt himself turn defensive when the tired man said his goodbyes to the others and joined him on the dirt road toward the lighthouse.

“You’re new here,” said the tired man.

B.J. had been told, a long time ago, he forgot by whom, that some people in New England still had that kind of puritanical and suspicious coldness about them. New Englanders were always trying to roughly recapitulate the Salem Witch Trials, this person had surmised. Maybe this was Peg? But he wasn’t certain that Peg had ever been east of the continental divide. This was the problem: taking everything out from back then had left some funny loose ends. For the most part, he'd gotten used to it over the interceding years.

“I’m visiting for the day,” B.J. said, trying to be diplomatic. 

“There’s a bad storm coming,” the tired man told him. “They’re going to stop running the ferry by noon.”

“You sure?”

“It was on the radio,” said the tired man, but his tone was more apologetic than interrogating.

“Do you think,” B.J. tried, “it seems silly to come all the way out here and not even walk around. Could I do a circuit around the island and make it back in time?”

The tired man shook his head. “You’d fall off a cliff in the fog. And we don’t need to be getting Matinicus’s reputation. I’ll escort you. Then we can get you a room at the inn. It’s basically the Plaza Hotel of lobstermen’s hostels.”

B.J. laughed. The tired man winced. “I’d be much obliged,” B.J. said. “Do you live here?”

“Almost all my life,” said the tired man, “with a few notable exceptions. There’s just about no other reason to be here in October. I had to ask you because it’s completely confounding. What are you even doing here?”

“Do I need a reason?”

“To be a stranger on this island outside tourist season? I should be asking for your travel papers.”

“Are people really that territorial out here?”

The tired man shrugged. “Nobody takes a two-hour ferry ride unless they want something. And there’s talk of strange folk abroad: Communists. Hippies. FBI informants.”

B.J. didn't know whether to be charmed or try to get away from this person as quickly as possible. “What would the FBI inform on?”

“This island is secretly a hotbed of hippie communists.”

B.J. burst out laughing. The tired man winced again. Maybe that was just how he laughed. “You’re funny,” B.J. said.

“Someone once told me it was an elaborate mask.”

“Well, it’s a nice one.”

They walked on up the hill, though the road took them to the north of the lighthouse and eventually it could not be seen among the tall pines. The forest was quiet but for their footsteps and it smelled like earthy loam and salt. Speaking of elaborate masks, the stillness was one. It was the face the storm put on to get into the party without causing a scene. It worked well enough that sometimes B.J. felt some old forgotten instinct — from those old forgotten days, or otherwise from caveman times — telling him they were being watched. Maybe that was just New England, but it was eerie enough that he stayed close to his escort.

The tired man was not exactly handsome, but his face was a puzzle you had to look at carefully to solve. His nose was not perfectly the right size for the rest of his features and it looked like the dark circles under his eyes had been painted there by a kindergarten artist using the palette of Edvard Munch. Under the raincoat he was wearing one of those Irish fisherman’s sweaters whose precise weave was supposed to help beachcombers identify washed-up corpses. Tattered canvas trousers showing long johns through a hole in the knee, scuffed black army-issue boots. Now that was something interesting.

Similarly, the island was not exactly beautiful. Something about it seemed to have been scraped away. Whatever terrific force had driven it wholly formed from the sea had long since begun to wash it away, as though it had been some unforgivable mistake that was now requiring to be erased. Everywhere was evidence of some bizarre violence: raw, bare scrapes of jagged gray rock, birches bent double like old beggars, abandoned cottages collapsed and moldering in the fog. As the well-rutted dirt road took them deeper into the pine woods in the interior of the island so too did it convey them further into some no-place of sustained collapse. The silence broken only by their footsteps and the occasional cool whispers of the wind. The clouds moved overhead quickly enough to be the layered tulle skirts of some fifties bobby-soxer desperately jiving at homecoming, color shifting, reaching hopelessly enough for the earth so as to sometimes nearly touch it.

“You don’t look like a fed to me,” said the tired man, who it seemed had been studying B.J. in kind. Evidently he was not giving up this line of questioning. “Are you a ghost? Do you have amnesia or something?”

B.J. shrugged. “The third one’s close,” he said.

“How can you be _close_ to amnesia?”

“I don’t normally tell strangers this,” B.J. said. In fact, some nervous chattering corner of his mind was reminding him that this was definitely not smart, even as the words came out of his mouth. “But I have… I guess a condition.”

“What kind of condition.”

“I brought it upon myself, really. You know, I was an army doctor in Korea.”

The tired man laughed tiredly through his nose. More like a huff than a laugh. Just a sound.

“When I got home — well, it was rough going for a while. They gave me the chance to try this surgery. Would you believe, I’d done enough of it but never gone under the knife myself.”

“You mean the memory surgery?”

B.J. was a little surprised. “It’s extremely classified.”

“They offered it to me too,” said the tired man. “I was in Korea too.”

“Say, really? Where?”

The tired man gave him a measured smile. “What does that surgery have to do with this place.”

“Things — come through, sometimes… they’re not really memories. They’re like messages… you ever remember a dream, and you can’t be certain when you even had it? It could have been childhood.”

“Messages,” said the tired man, ignoring the question in favor of that generative word.

“A few months ago, I had one, it was just the name of this place. It never really ends up meaning anything, but sometimes — you know, I like to try, just to see.”

“You just — saw? — the name of this place? Monhegan Island?”

“Someone left a copy of Yankee Magazine in the waiting room at my hospital.”

The tired man threw back his head and cackled. So that was how he laughed. “Out here we use that for toilet paper.”

“Right. But it had — ”

“ — an article, I know.” The tired man gestured as though the headline were in lights. “ _Magical Maine: The Midcoast Riviera._ The old guard were very upset. They don’t like anything that might increase the seasonal flow of New Yorkers.”

What about Californians, B.J. didn’t ask. “There was a picture of a red house — I guess a cottage — and the caption said _Crabapple Cove_.”

The tired man pursed his lips so tightly that they disappeared. “That was the message?” he asked.

“Yeah, do you know it?”

“When you say _message_ — ”

“I saw the words and — well, like I said, it was like remembering a dream, and then you’re certain you’ve forgotten the most important part of it… But do you know that house? You must know it.”

“I know it. It’s my house.”

“Your house is — ”

“What are some of your other messages?” the tired man asked. He sounded like he was trying very hard to keep any sense of urgency from his voice. “And what do you mean, they don't usually mean anything?”

“Well,” B.J. said carefully, wondering where this was going, “the last one, couple years ago, my daughter was reading _The Last of the Mohicans_ for school, and I stayed up all night reading it cover to cover about nine times…”

The tired man stopped in his tracks so that B.J. wound up a stride ahead of him. The breeze that moved softly in the low pines was bitter cold and smelled like salt and rain. Something — maybe it was that breeze — pulled an old cord and started a bell or something similar ringing deep inside him. “What is it,” said B.J.

The tired man scrubbed a hand over his face. There was very little color about him, except that his eyes were blue, but they were almost more gray than blue. It struck B.J. as very sad, though he could not say exactly why. Then the tired man put his hand out. “Hawkeye Pierce,” he said.

“Hey,” said B.J., returning the gesture, “no way. I’m — ”

“The jig is up, Beej,” Pierce said, almost disappointedly, clasping B.J.’s hand tightly, briefly. Something like a lightning bolt but slower went down B.J.’s spine through the sensitive spot at the back of his neck. “I know your name. It sounds like your brain sent you out here to find me.”

“Do you know why?”

“I think so. But I don't think you’re gonna like it.”

They walked on. The road shrunk into a narrow path that cut raggedly through the pines and brush. The summer overgrowth was shrinking back into the deep springy loam, and the fog was so thick that B.J. couldn’t see more than ten yards beyond the path into the trees. Beyond it he was certain now that something was watching them, though he was also certain that it wasn’t a person. He had the discomfiting thought that perhaps it was something big and consequential like fate, or history.

It had happened before, that he was supposed to know someone, but only briefly at the V.A. hospital in Richmond, across the bay from home, where the surgery had been performed and where he subsequently went twice yearly for checkups. Once a nurse had hugged him. That was the difficult thing about the surgery being so classified. He was supposed to say he’d had a head injury, but she looked like she knew that was bullshit. That was probably what he should have said to Pierce, but of course he would’ve known it was bullshit too.

“You’re going to want to check yourself for ticks tonight,” said Pierce, holding a thornbush aside so that B.J. could pass. “They like to burrow into the crotch, so you know.”

“That would make two of us.”

Pierce laughed his big cackling laugh that probably frightened off any living creature in a ten mile radius, but something about it connoted extreme pain. The way people sometimes laughed in the clinic during an exam when they were hurt or afraid and B.J. made a joke to loosen them up and they found it funnier than they should as though they had to or it would make everything real.

The path delivered them to a scrape of cliff. The fog was thick as a wall. Somewhere he couldn’t see the ocean broke rhythmically against the rock. “If it was a good day, we’d see seals,” Pierce said apologetically from over B.J.’s shoulder.

“It’s hard to believe there’s anything out there at all.”

“There's the tip of Nova Scotia, then nothing until you hit France. Depending on your definition of nothing.”

They walked onward along the edge of the stone scrape, staying close to the treeline. If there was a path, B.J. couldn’t see it. He understood why Pierce had said somebody might walk right over in fog this thick. Sometimes the sea was visible below, eerily still, pure gray, but looking over the edge gave him some mild vertigo.

“What’s Matinicus?” B.J. asked.

“What?”

“Earlier, you said you didn’t want to get Matinicus’s reputation.”

“It’s another island, east of here,” Pierce said. He took a long stride over a tangle of dry brush and turned the cool eyes on B.J. to watch him negotiate it. Then they walked on again. “Typical New England gothic hauntedness. And besides, the lobstermen are famously territorial and it’s been known to get ugly.”

“Seems like living all the way out here would drive anyone crazy.”

“Hmm,” Pierce said, “be careful to whom you say such a thing.”

“Why, would you throw me over?”

“My personal taste for violence is limited to self-flagellation,” Pierce explained. “And isolation is the best medicine for that. Personally, I’m set. But I can’t say that for everyone on this rock.”

Sometimes the wind blew stiffly and showed dark patterns on the water and whispered to the trees and shifted their clothes and hair. But mostly stillness. Not so very far above, as though if he climbed a tall tree they might be touchable, the clouds moved in twisting layers, like a box of snakes.

“So we knew each other,” B.J. tried. “In Korea.”

Pierce shrugged. “In passing.”

“Well where exactly did we do the passing?”

“I was a doctor too.”

“Say, really? Where?”

He watched Pierce’s shoulders rise and fall under the thick fabric of the green rain mac. The kind of breath you took when somebody was holding the cold disc of a stethoscope to the middle of your back and listening closely. 

“Will you let me ask you a question,” Pierce said evenly.

“Of course.”

“Why did you do it? The surgery? Why did you say yes?”

B.J. let his mouth quirk, the way he did when Peg asked him something she knew he couldn’t recall, even though Pierce wasn’t looking at him. For some reason he felt a similar instinct to be wryly apologetic. “Funny thing is, I don’t exactly remember.”

“Ha,” said Pierce. Not a laugh necessarily.

“What about you? You said they offered it to you. Why didn’t you do it?”

“I didn’t want to.”

“But why not?”

Pierce stopped in his tracks again — B.J. nearly ran him over — and fished a silver flask out from the pocket of his canvas pants. He took a sip and passed it to B.J. It was probably the worst gin on the planet.

“Remember what I said about self-flagellation,” Pierce said while B.J. sputtered and coughed like a teenager having sampled his dad’s scotch.

“It’s the only kind of violence you like,” B.J. managed through the burning sensation cauterizing his throat. He passed back the flask as though it were radioactive. It wouldn’t’ve surprised him if it were: that stuff was powerful enough to take millennia to denature.

“Right.” Pierce took another long swig — it was mostly impressive, but a little bit sad, how inured he was to the stuff — before tucking the flask back in his pocket. “Well, a person needs a whip made of something.”

They walked on. “You’re very self-aware,” B.J. noted. 

“I’m actually not. But I have a drinking buddy who’s a gifted psychoanalyst.”

“Now that’s a good friend for a veteran to have,” B.J. said. “I’ve got a few as well.”

“The doctors who gave you that surgery?”

“Sure.”

“Those are your friends?”

B.J. grabbed him by the shoulder, surprising himself. Pierce flinched, but it was a different flinch than a fear-of-being-hurt flinch. It was some other kind of flinch, not unlike his wincing laugh. He turned and they faced each other on the high bluff, standing close. Pierce was shorter than him but only physically, the same way Peg was. And just as she did, he wouldn’t look away. His eyes were very cold and clear, like the ghost of color in a bluejay feather.

“Why are you so — ” B.J. stopped, swallowed, collected himself, wondered what was happening, had the gin really hit him that fast? and started again. “What business is it of yours that I had an operation eleven years ago that has nothing to do with you at all?”

“Ha,” said Pierce. “It’s none of my business, except that someone once told me cutting into a healthy body was mutilation. And that a doctor shouldn’t operate on a patient because there’s something in it for himself. That’s it.”

“You think they — Pierce, I didn’t pay a dime for it.”

“Maybe not in cash. You think the army does anything out of the kindness of their hearts? You’re nothing but a six-foot-four hairless guinea pig in their eyes.”

That he was probably right was untenable. “So that’s the real reason why,” B.J. suggested.

“Why what?”

“Why you didn’t — ”

“Listen,” Pierce interjected, “I gave the army enough. I gave them more than enough, and against my will to boot. They said a year, well, it was three, and it felt like ten. Why would I let them have even more? For the purpose of… whatever unthinkable evil brain experiments? Who do you think I am?”

B.J. wasn’t offended. He heard worse all the time at the V.F.W. “Is that really it?” he asked.

Pierce just looked at him. B.J. was beginning to recognize that he had this unique expression roughly communicating _get with the program_. “Of course not,” he said.

They walked on. Pierce was in a bit of a huff, judging by the cavalier way he trampled the dead brush. It was a huff he seemed maybe a little too old to be in, B.J. thought, feeling himself go a little sour. A huff he probably wouldn’t be in if he was married with a kid or two and living in a place conducive to human fellowship and sanity. He wondered what he’d thought of this strange person when they knew each other. Pierce didn't seem like he was capable of knowing anybody casually.

“You still see patients?” B.J. asked him.

“I do surgery twice a week at the clinic in Port Clyde,” Pierce said. “Not to mention everyone on this island certainly comes to my house whenever they have so much as an ingrown toenail.”

“You’re the only doctor out here?”

“The only doctor of medicine. The guy whose property we’re on right now, Andrew, I think he’s a doctor of art history.”

B.J. chuckled despite himself. His sister-in-law was a museum curator in Los Angeles and occasionally he had visited the Getty with her and had been moved to tears looking at Van Gogh’s irises. 

“It’s not funny,” Pierce went on. “What are you going to do if you come down with a case of gouache?”

B.J. laughed. He felt the laugh warm him up, like hot milk. “I hear it’s serious,” he said.

The path cut around the deep coves and ledges, weaving and braiding along the coast with such complexity that the wind felt and smelled and tasted different sometimes from step to step. “Anything ringing any bells,” Pierce asked him eventually.

There’s no bells left to ring, B.J. wanted to tell him. Just the ghosts of bells, now. “It’s beautiful,” he said instead.

“How does it compare to the ocean in California?”

B.J. didn’t think he’d mentioned California. It must have been one of those things Pierce knew somehow from before. “It’s like a different species in the same genus,” he said. “It can be just as angry when it wants to be. But, you know what, it’s funny to see it go on forever off to the east instead of the west.”

Pierce nodded. “My dad, for a while, before I was born, worked as a medic on a few crews laying telephone line in rural Alaska. And he said, the ocean here is like a puppy version of the ocean there. It can still do a number on your ankles, but it doesn’t quite have the teeth to rip your guts out.”

“Your dad has your same sense of humor.”

“He taught me everything I know. But he died three years ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

Pierce looked back at him. “You don’t need to be sorry to me about death,” he said.

“But I am sorry.”

Pierce shrugged. “I've seen people die in just about every conceivable way. I've watched their organs stop working when they die. You have too, you just don’t remember it. So my dad — he was comfortable, he was sleeping, he just stopped. His body turned off. He was seventy-seven. The first thing I thought was, I know so many people who would have envied him.”

“I guess our line of work would give anybody a — well, I guess an unusual lens on it all,” B.J. said. When it was all out of his mouth he cringed at how naive it sounded, but Pierce nodded. “I’m a GP at a public hospital in San Francisco,” B.J. explained.

“So I’m sure you’ve seen just about every conceivable type of death in your memory, too.”

“You betcha,” B.J. agreed. “The gunshot wounds are bad. The overdoses might be worse. The worst, I think, is people who don’t realize they have cancer until most of their body is cancer, and they come into the ER with a couple of weeks or even days to live. And all you can say is, yes, there’s a reason you've been feeling sick for months or years. And no, there's nothing I can do about it but give you enough morphine to sleep.”

“I didn't think anybody got cancer in California,” Pierce said. “I thought there was a cotton candy fountain and all that nonsense.”

B.J. shook his head. “California is just America trying to shove the whole dream in at the end of the continent.”

“I guess it didn’t fit.”

“No, not even close.” B.J. smiled. “What's Maine, by those parameters?”

“New England was the original American frontier,” Pierce said. “ _A fiction meaning blood,_ as Berryman says.”

“And now?”

“You saw the license plates. _Vacationland_. What do you think it means?”

“Something about empire and complacency.”

The path was wide enough now that they could walk beside each other. Between the sea and sky’s warring planes of endless gray the yellow lichen spattering the rocks was bright as new crosswalk paint.

“Did they turn you into some kind of reverse Manchurian Candidate?” Pierce asked. “A fed with hippies’ parlance?”

B.J. laughed. “They didn't turn me into anything.” He shrugged. “Maybe a better husband and father.”

Pierce made a bemused expression with no warmth in it. “Right,” he said.

B.J. took one of those stethoscope breaths. For something he was always telling other people to do, he rarely did it himself. “I don’t think we should talk about the operation any more,” he said, trying to keep his tone diplomatic. “If we really are old acquaintances, we should just be… enjoying our reunion.”

Pierce sucked his teeth. “Fine,” he agreed. “But can you answer one more question for me?”

"Depends on what it is.”

“It’s very reasonable,” Pierce said. “Do you ever get those _messages_ at work?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you ever feel — what did you call it, like remembering a dream? Does that ever happen when you’re operating?”

B.J. shrugged. “It's different,” he said. “Sometimes, with a lot of trauma, car accidents and things, at first it’s overwhelming, and then when I start I feel like I’ve done it thousands of times before.”

“Because you have,” Pierce said, as though B.J. had not inferred this pretty much as soon as they let him back into surgery again after the operation.

“They said they weren’t one-hundred percent on the muscle memory yet,” B.J. explained, “you know, the army neurologists.”

“It’s lucky for the citizens of San Francisco at the end of the day,” Pierce told him. “If I was in a car accident on the Golden Gate, I would want you.”

“You would?”

“Of course.”

At last, beyond the bluff, there was no more island left. There was just a rusted hulk vaguely the shape of a boat thrown up on the rocks and shredded to pieces like a child's abandoned toy. The water winnowed and seethed through rafts of seaweed and rotting ropes of copperish kelp up to the cast-off parts of the old shipwreck and then slunk away again like a dog with scraps. The coast cut off again toward the northwest. Beyond the island now, the bitter, clammy wind carried the storm toward them over the sea.

“Did you ever operate on me,” B.J. asked Pierce.

“No, I never did. Nor you on me. Suffice it to say I’m just a great admirer of your work.”

“You sure you haven’t gotten me confused with the doctor of art history?”

“Ha ha,” said Pierce. “And if you make a pun about _tempera_ -ture, I’m shoving you over the bluff.”

They went off again, skirting a deep cove where the breakers threw sheets of white lace over half-sunk stones, slinking through the manicured boxwoods of a boarded-up summer mansion, ducking heads under low branches through a half-wild, winter-bare orchard…

“Where are we now?” B.J. asked.

Pierce gestured inland. “Almost home,” he said, and B.J. looked up and caught first — or second — glimpse of the house though the trees.

It was a small cottage, smaller than it had looked in the picture, just far enough from the edge of the bluff to preclude rational worry about a rogue wave wiping it from the face of the earth. Across the long field, partly mowed and partly wild, tangled dry grasses and scraps of dead summer flowers susurrated in the sea wind; the woods encroached, swaying in time, gray-black, and the deep pines, a hoard of dancers in pagan garb, seemed to move toward them…

The photograph in Yankee Magazine had captured the cottage at Crabapple Cove from its most flattering angle. Whole, now, it seemed less like a bucolic summer getaway and more like the sort of place which was lived in not only by a real person but by a real scatterbrained lonely single veteran doctor. About eighty percent of the houses in Maine, from B.J.’s limited experience, were weather-beaten gray shingle, in order to effectively camouflage with the darkest clouds and the angriest sea, and Pierce’s house was not dissimilar, except it was obstinately red, albeit a bit muted and bleached by the salt on the wind. Peeling cornflower-blue shutters, listing brick chimney, a sagging roof that could use replacement. The beat-up Adirondack chairs on the porch were tied down with colorful sailing lines against the wind. In a protected lee behind the house was a bare little garden plot covered with dark compost and clover for the winter, and a few rusting bicycles in varying states of junkiness were chained to the base of a listing flagpole with no flag on it. There was a decaying red truck in the driveway that would never pass inspection on the mainland, and a lawnmower handle and rotting beach umbrella poking out from under the porch. Stacked up against the red shingle siding was a pile of firewood covered in a tarp that roughly matched Pierce’s army green rain mac.

“This is it,” Pierce sad. “Ringing any — nevermind.”

“It’s very nice,” B.J. assured him.

“It’s home. It’s a roof over my head.” Pierce shrugged, watching over the lawn and the trees and then toward the water with a calculating eye, surveying the sea, the wind, the clouds. Whatever he read must not have been good. “For now. You might as well just come in.”

They went together through the unlocked kitchen door and struggled out of raincoats and galoshes in the foyer. It was cozy inside, all painted white to hold as much light as could be retained in the dark winter, and the radio was on. “Today in Vietnam…” The window above the sink in the bright little kitchen opened toward the sea. To the south even an untrained eye like B.J.’s could see that the clouds were growing darker. Across a narrow threshold was the living room, which was crowded with a cluster of outdated and mismatched furniture. Coffee mugs, fingerprinted martini glasses, a set of 1936 encyclopedias, a copy of the latest Beatles record, _Revolver_ , on the turntable. Darkened stairs to the upper floor. There was an old army-issue medical bag with a red cross silkscreened on the front flap shoved under one of the side tables. Pierce put the light on and opened the curtains: these windows faced the field and the woods. The wind turned what was left of the leaves inside out. Rattled through the house. “It begins,” Pierce said, like the rugged old lawman in some western.

B.J. sat on the water-stained chintz couch, across from an armchair that buckled and sagged. It looked like the ghost of a person — Pierce's father? — was sitting in it. “Cup of tea,” Pierce asked him.

“Anything stronger?”

“I was hoping you’d say that.”

He slouched back into the kitchen. B.J. folded his hands in his lap and watched the wind. The calm voice on the radio was talking about a fire aboard the aircraft carrier _Oriskany_ which had killed forty-four crewmen, and then it quickly changed the subject to discuss Johnson’s visit to the troops at Cam Ranh AFB. B.J. only heard a few seconds of this report before Pierce turned the radio off. In the fragile silence the surf against the bluff sounded like a heartbeat through a stethoscope.

B.J. got up and went to the threshold and leaned his head into the kitchen. “Pierce?”

Pierce had thrown open all the bare whitewashed cabinets in search of something, and, evidently not having found it, was cutting the mold off a block of pale cheese. “Listen,” he said, fixing B.J. with an expression that might have been murderous if it wasn’t so sad, “you’ve got to call me Hawkeye. You’ve just got to.”

“Alright, Hawkeye,” B.J. said, though it was a funny thing to call a person. “You mind if I take a look through your record albums?”

“Go for it.” He turned back to the cheese, which he was doctoring with surgical precision. “Put something on if you want to.”

B.J. went back to the shelf of vinyl and crouched and flipped through it as he had frequently lost hours doing at the basement shops in San Francisco, not usually buying anything, just looking, just loving the feel of the cardboard sleeves and their smell, the music in the shop, the stillness, until it had gotten dark and he was elbow-deep in esoterica and the proprietor came over to kick him out. Hawkeye had a lot of jazz, some blues, seemingly just about everything ever recorded by Bill Evans, Miles Davis, Mingus, Coltrane, Billie Holiday. In a messy stack under the record player were the albums evidently on heaviest rotation — Nina Simone, the Byrds, Bob Dylan, Odetta. _Rubber Soul, Help!_ , and _Runnin’ Out of Fools,_ a record by a singer B.J. had never heard of whose name was Aretha Franklin.

Eventually he stood, feeling the blood rush back to his feet, and just flipped _Revolver_ back to side A on the turntable and started it again from the top of “Taxman.” Shuffling, tape fuzz, counting, coughs. _Let me tell you how it will be…_

Hawkeye came struggling into the parlor room, balancing the Frankenstein-looking cheese and some ravaged saltine crackers arrayed unartfully on a cutting board, cocktail shaker pinned between his forearm and chest, two martini glasses held precariously between his fingers. “I’m no good at entertaining,” he said, not exactly all that apologetically, when B.J. came over to relieve him of the cheese plate.

“I’ve basically invited myself into your house out of my own cluelessness,” B.J. reminded him. “You’re being remarkably hospitable.”

“Well, that means a lot, coming from you.”

B.J. didn’t understand what this meant. He laughed a little because it seemed like the right thing to do. He sat again on the couch and Hawkeye took the haunted armchair and set about pouring the clear, viscous, frosty liquid in the shaker into the two martini glasses. He’d evidently made more than enough for several rounds. “The trick is to just roll the vermouth in the glass,” he said. “That’s how you get it just right. Drier than Hades — I mean, desiccated.”

“Huh,” said B.J., who lately had preferred his martinis dirty, with a little olive juice. He lifted his glass, but then he wasn’t sure what to say.

“To the river Lethe,” Hawkeye said.

“What?”

“It’s Greek — fine. To… auld acquaintance.”

“Cheers.”

They clinked glasses. B.J. sipped his only to find it was more of that incredibly bad gin. By the time he had gotten the sip down, with middling success, Hawkeye had drained his and was pouring himself another. On the stereo, McCartney was describing all the lonely people and asking the listener to reflect upon where they might have come from and where, consequently, they all belonged. Inside B.J.’s chest was something sharp and cold, like a shard of ice. He took another sip and let the gin burn it out.

“Are you a Beatles fan,” he asked Hawkeye.

“Am I… a living human being, breathing, with ears?”

“I guess some people — well. One of the guys I work with doesn’t like the psychedelica.”

“His loss. ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ is the best song on the album. Maybe the best song they’ve ever made. I’ve never heard anything like that before. You know something, it really shook me.”

B.J. nodded. “I don’t know if I’ll ever forget where I was when I first listened to it.”

“Where were you?”

“At home with Peg,” he said, “my wife. The week it came out. Put the kids to bed. Poured two glasses of wine — ”

“ — you don’t need to let me into your marital bedroom!” 

“Shut it, you,” B.J. laughed. “All we did was listen to it together, sitting criss-cross applesauce in front of the speakers like little kids… why, what about you?”

“I was here alone.”

“It sounds like that’s a semipermanent condition.”

“Just about.” He shrugged. “Had a joint — my payment from one of the lobstermen in exchange for a couple of sutures. I guess that helped, but it felt like a glimpse of the future. The future has more — more, better, different ways to be.”

“Do you really think so?”

“I get on my knees and pray every night.”

“Me too,” B.J. said.

Hawkeye fixed him. It was like certain conditions had had to fall into place before the pain in his face could be read or even seen. Once B.J. noticed it — it was around his eyes, mostly — there was no missing it again. It was a terrible quantity of pain and not all of it belonging to himself. “I know,” he said.

B.J. downed the rest of his martini. He knew what he had to say. When he really thought about it, just about as deeply as he could through all the buzzing, adrenaline and booze — “your brain is still healing itself,” the doctors in Richmond had said, “as far as we know, it might always be trying to heal itself” — he had known this since he had first seen Hawkeye in front of the inn by the ferry dock. “We knew each other more than in passing, didn't we?”

Hawkeye tried a smile of questionable sincerity. “Can’t you tell?”

“Why’d you lie?”

“I’m trying to have respect for your choice,” Hawkeye said. He refreshed his and B.J.’s martinis from the shaker, draining the last of the liquid into B.J.’s glass.

“Trying?”

“It’s very hard.”

If Hawkeye really was a stranger, B.J. might’ve been offended. “Why?”

“There’s so much I want to tell you that’ll mean absolutely nothing to you. So much I want to ask you that you won’t know the answer to. I don't think I’ve ever treaded so lightly with anybody in my life. Least of all with you.”

“You don’t have to tread lightly with me.”

“What if I accidentally open some huge can of worms and ruin your… meticulously constructed version of reality?”

“Well, maybe that’s what's supposed to happen,” B.J. said, meeting Hawkeye’s gaze. He’d meant the eye contact to be comforting but it backfired on him like an old motorcycle. The look on Hawkeye’s face was like his unique version of Peg’s when she loved him too much to tell him something. It was frightening to see. It was even more frightening to understand that he knew what it meant. And still B.J. said, “Tell me something. Just one little thing.”

“One little thing?”

“Just one. Please.”

“Okay. We lived together in a tent for about two and a half years.”

“In a tent?”

“I mean, it was a pretty big one, as tents go. With a revolving cast of misfits. Ringing any bells?”

“That’s the point. I don’t think it will. All that is just… gone. I’m only going to know what you tell me. And I do want to hear another.”

“Are you — ”

“Stop asking if I’m sure. I’m sure.”

Hawkeye drained the rest of the martini. “We were surgeons in a MASH unit. That’s Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. The 4077th. Our job was to… basically triage and stabilize the wounded. Get them back to the line or at least alive enough to make it to Tokyo for real surgery. It was brutal operating as you could probably imagine and sometimes we were in the OR for over thirty-six hours just pulling tiny shards of metal out of the viscera of teenage boys… Should I keep going?”

“Why not?”

“This is presumably the stuff you got rid of on purpose.”

“I can handle the gory details.”

Hawkeye gave him that terrible look again. This time it said, I know you can, but do you want to? “I need to make another round of drinks,” he said.

B.J. couldn’t argue with that. “Alright.”

“Put another record on,” Hawkeye advised. His knees cracked when he got up. “Another martini?”

“Sure, but I usually take them with a little more vermouth than round one.”

Hawkeye fixed him with an expression of utmost pity. “Dear god,” he said, “what have they done to you?” But before B.J. could answer he disappeared into the kitchen.

He might’ve been afraid — this had never happened before — but instead he felt light. Almost elated. When he stood up, he realized he was drunk. Laughed to himself. Stumbled over to the record player and lifted the needle off _Revolver_ , cradling the warm vinyl like a baby. He swapped it out for Dylan’s _Bringing It All Back Home._

“Good one,” Hawkeye yelled from the kitchen just about the second the needle dropped on “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”

B.J. felt like some kind of great rubber band had been put around them. He went to the kitchen threshold and leaned against the doorframe. “I think I preferred _Highway 61 Revisited_ ,” he said.

Hawkeye had gotten out an unmarked blue-green glass bottle from somewhere and was just upending it into the cocktail shaker. “Well, me too, but you can’t beat ‘Maggie’s Farm.’” He winced. “That would’ve been funnier if you remembered something.”

“What?”

“You could say we worked on Maggie’s farm. But she went by Margaret.” He gave the shaker another glug of bathtub gin and then put the cork back in the bottle and stuck it under the sink. “Want to go out and get a log for the fire?”

“That gin’ll warm me up plenty.”

Hawkeye shook his head. “You’ll want the embers tonight. Winds over fifty, they start coming through the house.”

B.J. got his raincoat and galoshes back on, struggling to balance on one foot, and went outside through the kitchen door, wrestling it closed behind him even as the wind tried its damndest to get him out of his layers again, or otherwise pick him up like a kite and send him sailing over the bluff. Something had cranked the gas up under the cold slate sea and set it roiling. It wasn’t raining yet but the fog was cold and thick enough to seep right through fabric and skin and into bone. B.J. was no stranger to fog — he was from the Bay Area — but this breed was vengeful. It was like walking through a mire of ghosts. He remembered what Hawkeye had said earlier about the New England gothic hauntedness, and realized it must have been him who had made that quip about the Salem Witch Trials.

Of course they had known each other well before, B.J. thought, laughing to himself, lifting the tarp from the woodpile against the house, careful for spiders. He wondered how much else of heretofore uncertain origin had arisen from this source. Maybe he would find out.

But wasn’t the whole point not to find out? Something itched in the back of his brain. For the first couple years, he’d had headaches that felt like an old sunburn. The dead cells sloughing away. Not since those days had he wanted to take his thirty-three-year-old self, fresh off the plane home from Seoul and shot full of enough ennui to kill a school of poets, back behind the nearest shed and sock him in the face.

“What were you thinking,” he asked himself, letting the wind spool the words out of his mouth. “Why?”

Inside he heard Hawkeye singing in a not-at-all-Dylanish theatrical baritone: _Well I wake up in the morning, fold my hands, and pray for rain…_

He had to have known back then that if given the chance he would pull this thread. Even if he was past forty and his hair was bad. He had to have known himself — even then. Even at the worst, as Peg said when she spoke about those days. He had to have known who he was. Didn’t he?

When he came back in, his raincoat was dripping and his hair was soaked. “Is it raining?” Hawkeye asked him.

B.J. presented him with the log, which he’d kept dryish under his coat. “It seems like we’re basically inside a cloud.”

“How’s the wind?”

“Brazen. Pushy.”

“She cop a feel?”

“She tried to rip my clothes off!”

“Who could blame her?”

In the living room B.J. sat back on the couch and let Hawkeye do the work, having not lit a fire himself, in his memory, since Boy Scouts. Even Peg tended to do it for him when they went camping in the Redwoods.

“It would get cold over there,” Hawkeye said into the fireplace. He was crouching on the floor in his holey wool socks, coaxing flame from kindling and old newspaper and cardboard. “We had these little stoves that emitted heat in about a one-foot radius. So cold you thought you'd never get warm. Or alternatively it was so hot you thought you’d never get cold.”

“What was worse?”

“I couldn’t choose. You couldn’t get away from the heat. It made everything stink. It made everybody stink. It got everybody’s temper sharp as a tack. But you couldn’t get away from the cold either. And the cold — ”

In the fireplace, gold light jumped against the ash-black brick, spilling new color and deeper shadow across the room.

“There’s very little that’s worse for despair than cold,” Hawkeye said, getting up, dusting ash from his hands. Like some kind of aggrieved starlet he threw himself down dissolutely in the collapsing armchair.

“That’s your prescription, doctor?”

“Sure. Ten cc’s of subzero temperatures for guaranteed murderous and self-negating thoughts.”

“What else,” B.J. asked.

“What else is there?”

“From Korea? Nothing else?”

Hawkeye waved a hand. “You’ll read it in my memoirs,” he said, reaching for the cocktail shaker on the coffee table. “It feels even more useless than usual these days, now that we’re doing it all again.”

It being 1966, every conversation, once it had touched upon the Beatles, wound its way back around to Vietnam. Hawkeye refreshed his own martini glass with more of that godawful gin and then held the shaker out toward B.J., eyebrow cocked. Were the conversation heading just about any other way, and especially if he weren’t already tipsy, B.J. would likely have passed on consuming any more of what he was now assuming to be either pure paint thinner or nuclear power plant coolant.

“I don’t know why it makes me want to drink,” B.J. said, lifting his glass for Hawkeye to fill. “But it does.”

“It’s because you have the barest vestige of sanity about you.”

“I do?”

“Do you ever wonder who we are now,” Hawkeye mused, “or, rather, maybe, what we are now? I’m sure it's different for you.”

“I thought we were human beings.”

“Really?”

“Sometimes I feel like I must be crazy. I can’t remember Korea, but I know it happened. Somehow it seems to have gotten erased from the collective memory. But — somehow — even better than they did mine.”

Hawkeye tapped his nose. “At least they had the sense of dignity to try and brand World War I _the War to End All Wars,_ ” he said. “They’re not even pretending like we actually accomplished anything in Korea. They’ve hung their whole hat on this hope that if nobody talks about it, history will do what history does and write over it with something else. And we know what something else!”

They talked for hours. They finished off whatever was in the bottle under the sink so that Hawkeye went down into the basement with a flashlight and resurfaced with another and cobwebs in his hair, pretending to be a protagonist from an Edgar Allen Poe story until B.J. nearly fell off the couch laughing. Near dark, the rain began to lash the windows, and somewhere — it could have been miles off across the sea or lashed to the roof of the collapsing barn beyond the orchard next door — a foghorn started moaning like a lost banshee… They talked about Vietnam, about the Selma to Montgomery marches, Russian satellites, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover, _On the Road_ , “Howl,” _The Naked Lunch;_ Hawkeye asked if everything they said was happening in San Francisco was really happening, and B.J. said, well, to some extent… for instance, there really was a shop selling special glass implements for purposes of smoking pot, and some people said they would sell you LSD under the table, which led to a conversation about Timothy Leary and Ram Dass and friends of Hawkeye’s who had allegedly been in the Harvard Psilocybin Project…

They had long since quit the charade of sloshing “gin” into the cocktail shaker, and, as such, were well on their way to being truly soused, by the time Hawkeye lifted his martini glass to the light, peered through it like a prism, and said, “How has everything and nothing changed?”

“You ever get a fucked up grocery cart with three wheels that turn and one that doesn’t?”

“I just can't stand feeling like it was all some kind of trial run.”

“How so?”

“Like all of it was… practice. Like learning anatomy on a cadaver before the real thing.”

“Are you accusing the American foreign policy establishment of desecrating a corpse?”

“Creating, desecrating, you name it. Millions of them, over and over. For what?”

Sometimes B.J. and Peg talked about this kind of thing, after the kids had gone to bed. All he could do sometimes was lie awake hoping against hope that the conflict in Vietnam would be over and done before the boys were old enough to be drafted.

“I know you know the answer,” Hawkeye said. “You don’t have to say it. Listen, sometimes I think that if they’d told me then, it’ll all happen over again just the same but worse in ten years’ time, maybe I would have said yes to the surgery. It might be easier to be surprised.”

“It's not,” B.J. told him. “Take it from me. Besides, you don’t need to lie for my benefit. I know you wouldn’t've done it, no matter what they told you.”

Hawkeye gave him a wry grin. “How do you know that?”

“I might not know you from back then, but I know you well enough now.”

“How well’s well enough?”

“I can tell why we were friends. And I hope we can be friends again.”

Something about the wry grin wobbled, like the fine china on the high shelf in a mild earthquake. The pressure changed; the wind changed. Something shifted or destabilized just enough to make them both change their balance lest they send this whole rough detente sprawling.

“My heart’s been racing all day,” Hawkeye said carefully. He put his wrist out, resting his forearm on his knee. He had good hands for a surgeon, B.J. noticed — fine-boned, narrow, strong — but the fingernails were ragged. “Go ahead, feel it.”

It should hardly have felt so intimate to do this thing he’d done hundreds or even thousands of times before, on a person he should have barely known. He wrapped his hand around Hawkeye’s wrist and tightened his fingertips against the radial pulse where hand met forearm. His brain, without his asking it to, started counting the quick leaping beats against the second hand on his wristwatch.

“Stop doing that,” Hawkeye said.

“Doing what?”

“You don’t have to be a doctor right now. That’s not what I’m asking.”

Their eyes met. B.J. felt the pulse under his fingers skip.

“I should ask you if you’ve had an EKG or an ultrasound,” B.J. said. “It’s hard to tell if something’s wrong with the heart unless you catch it in action.”

“Nothing’s wrong with my heart,” Hawkeye said. “Or, you know, the normal things.”

“Clogged arteries?”

“Physician, heal thyself,” Hawkeye advised. “It’s all that deep fried pining.”

“That’ll get you.”

Hawkeye twisted his hand in B.J.’s grip and pressed his own thumb against B.J.’s pulse. “Yours is really kicking too.”

“I don’t know why.”

“What if you do?”

“But I — ”

“ — you do. Listen. You have to. Somewhere in there — you just have to. Think.”

B.J. jerked his wrist out of Hawkeye’s grip. “I keep telling you there’s nothing — ”

“ — but you also keep telling me there's something! These _messages_?”

“I can’t — I don’t know when, I don’t know why…”

“You know, I knew you were oblivious, but this takes the proverbial cake! What did you tell me on the bluff? What are your messages about? _Who_ are your messages about?”

You, B.J. thought, or said without sound, or otherwise the room was so full of the word — like the wind dislodging dust from the timbers — that there was no need to say it aloud.

Several things became apparent. First was that the rain had reached some impossible new acme of aggression. The lights flickered and the golden firelight shook and shuddered and hissed against the brazier. It had to have been bad if it was coming down the chimney. The house shivered and away across the field the trees cracked and moaned. Wherever it was, omnipresent and omnipotent in the fog, like a lost witch, the foghorn went on sobbing and sobbing its mournful tortured birdcall.

“Can I ask you something maybe uncouth,” B.J. said.

“You’ve never asked me a single couth thing,” Hawkeye told him. “Don’t start now.”

The second thing was still coming to him, like some kind of faulty radio transmission. It was quite calm, quite steady, quite sure, like the storm’s eye, wherever it was. “It’ll sound funny,” he said.

“That's alright.”

“Were we — ah.”

Hawkeye just watched him. So this was where his name came from. He could tell a lot by watching. Then he could be very still and wait just as long as he needed to.

“I’m sorry. It’s just — ”

“It won’t get any easier,” Hawkeye advised. “You have to rip off the band-aid.”

“Alright,” B.J. dared. At the height of breath, he felt the most alive he could remember. “Were we in love?”

The wind roared. Hawkeye steadied his martini glass with two fingers. The fire guttered and it drew his face in a deep, strange shadow. “Experts on love might’ve said so,” he said lightly.

B.J. sat heavily against the stiff back of the couch. The chill which touched the nape of his neck was of such magnitude that he almost turned to see if the rain was coming through the window. “So we were,” he said.

“I thought so. But I’m not an expert on love.”

He thought of the storm and how it was a lot of dervish whirling around a center made of lemon candy or something else that was tart but sweet. Then you had to go through all the worst of it again before you might make it out the other side.

“What did I do?” B.J. asked. He was dimly aware that he sounded hysterical. “What did we do?”

Hawkeye’s eyebrow fairly catapulted up his forehead. “What did _you_ do?”

Outside it sounded like the wind must have taken something with it over the cliff. Maybe one of the Adirondack chairs. Larger catastrophes were happening in the wreckage of B.J.’s memory. “Oh, fuck,” he said.

Hawkeye made a painful sound like a scoff and a laugh crossbred by a mad scientist into a grotesque monstrosity.

“God,” B.J. managed. “How can you stand the sight of me?”

“Well, it’s going better than I thought it would. But if you must know, I feel like I’m being eviscerated with a melon baller.”

B.J. got up. The room spun, even when he covered his eyes with a stabilizing hand. “I saw the bunkhouse you mentioned,” he managed, “down by the harbor, they’re bound to have a vacancy on a night like this — ”

“Sit down. You’re not going down there, Beej. You think I’d put you out? In this storm? Listen, this is what I thought would happen, over there, at the end. I didn’t think we’d ever see each other again. You just… fucked it up and made it harder and easier. Sit down.”

Thank heaven. He wouldn’t’ve made it fifty yards like this. He fairly collapsed on the couch and buried his head in his hands. “I cheated on Peg,” he managed, after possibly an age of the earth.

Hawkeye sighed. “Yes,” he said. “You did.”

“You pretended you didn’t know me.”

“Like I said,” Hawkeye told him. “I’ve been trying to have respect for your choice.”

“I chose — holy hell.”

“You can’t be blamed for choosing what you did — well, maybe like eighty percent of what you did — in the year of our supposed lord nineteen fifty-five.”

B.J. looked up, and then he had to look away from the expression on Hawkeye’s face. He watched the fire in the fireplace until he could see it in photonegative inverse when he closed his eyes. “It’s me,” he said, “isn’t it.”

“What’s you?”

“That terrible thing that weighs you down.”

“Don’t think so highly of yourself. It's mostly all the unfathomable atrocities we witnessed.”

“But some of it is me.”

“Some of it is you.”

“I’m so sorry.”

He felt Hawkeye's index finger touch his kneecap and then slip off. “That milk is very spilled,” he said.

Before B.J. had left for Maine, he and Peg had had one of their typical whispered fights out on the porch while the kids were either asleep or desperately arguing upstairs over whose turn it was to press their little ear to the screen and report out to the rest on whatever could be overheard. Peg had been pleased that he was going. She kept telling him that he should be out there for as long as he wanted. He’d suggested that they make it into a family trip. And she had shut that down before the kids could get excited about it. B.J. had said something along the lines of, I can’t remember if you ever understood but I did this so that we could be a real family. And Peg had said something along the lines of, That’s the steamingest crock of bullshit you've ever cooked up for yourself or me and I wish you did remember that I tried to talk you out of it.

“I think maybe it’s the same for you,” Hawkeye was saying. “Some of it is me. Some of it is — everything else.”

“I feel like that war found enough of its own ways to manufacture human collateral without me making more of it out of you.”

“I feel like the heart is fragile and strange. I feel like the mind is the same or worse. And I feel like that war made its own reality and we did what we had to do to survive.”

“Really?”

“Really how?”

“That's all? That’s what you believe?”

Hawkeye pursed his mouth. “Do you really want to know,” he asked, except that it wasn’t really a question. 

B.J. leaned back against the couch. “I suppose if I did,” he said, “I wouldn’t’ve gotten rid of it.”

Hawkeye touched his nose. To do it he had to break the white-knuckled knot of his hands in his lap.

“I must’ve told you,” B.J. surmised.

“You sent a letter.”

“Oh, god. I did?”

“If they offered me the surgery again — this is where you were wrong, earlier — I think I’d take it, and I’d tell them just to take that part out. Getting that letter. I want it gone. For good. It makes the rest feel like — ” his face twisted — “a day at the beach.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I bet you are.”

“Did you burn it?”

Hawkeye shook his head. He got to his feet — his knees cracked — and went to the bookshelf, where he took down a tattered copy of _A Farewell to Arms_.

“God, you don't keep it in _that_ book?”

“I’ll keep it where I damn well please,” Hawkeye said. “You’re the one that wrote it!”

The envelope was tattered and soft. Hawkeye put it down on the coffee table between them. “You don’t have to read it,” he said, “but I’m going to leave it there just in case you want to.”

“What if I threw it over the bluff?”

“Then you’d be going over next.”

You really loved me that bad, B.J. wondered. Wondered so hard and so drunkenly he might as well have said it aloud, though he didn’t think he did, but it seemed like Hawkeye heard it anyway.

The wind shook the house. Hawkeye cracked his back. “I’m going to bed,” he said.

“Now hold on. You can’t just leave without — ”

“Without leaving a note?”

“Wait, what?”

“I can’t just leave without a sense of closure? I can’t just decide I’ve had enough?”

“That’s not fair.”

“You ought to take that up with the department of idioms, considering the intersection of love and war should be fairest of all.”

“Can’t you be serious for one minute?”

“No! Of course not. This is my house! And I’m going to bed because I can’t take much more of this, which — you would remember exactly why if you could remember anything at all. I don’t have the constitution for this kind of headtrip anymore. So that’s goodnight to you.”

“But — ”

“The toilet’s off the kitchen,” Hawkeye went on, steamrolling B.J.’s protestations. “And there are more blankets in that trunk. Have a glass of water before you go to bed. Oh, and I have bad dreams. So if you hear screaming just don’t worry about it.”

“You don’t want me to wake you up or something?”

“No. I’m used to it.”

“Did you have them then? Over there?”

“Of course I did!”

“Why didn’t you let them — ”

“You used to wake me up sitting on the edge of… what passed for the bed,” Hawkeye said, “stroking my hair. Goodnight.”

B.J. was dumbstruck. “Sleep well,” he managed.

“See you in the morning.”

Then the sound of his stocking feet on the creaky stairs. Something reached inside B.J., grabbed hold of a stretchy part of his heart that he hadn’t known was there, and started pulling, and it stretched and stretched like old chewing gum, until he thought he should get to his feet and follow Hawkeye up to his bedroom. What would happen if he did? Would they have the same dreams? Upstairs a light went on, then there was some quiet rustling. B.J. went through the kitchen into the tiny bathroom, stretching that strange cord so much it began to hurt; he tried to piss with extreme accuracy, then he splashed his face with cold water and drank some from his cupped hands, and by the time he got back into the living room again the light upstairs was off, and it was so dark in the tiny house that he could see the sky outside was a deep, angry red, like a rotting bruise. He got a blanket from the trunk and lay down on the couch, folding his hands over the place that was hurting in his chest, watching through the dark window at the moving edge of the trees.

He didn't think he would sleep, but he did. (Hawkeye didn’t.) On the edge of it, he thought he knew what the letter said:

_Hawk,_

_By the time you get this — well maybe you already know. Maybe they gave you the chance too. I already know you will have told them no because you are about the stubbornest person on this earth. Also for some reason I can’t quite figure out you think you deserve everything bad that ever happened to you._

_I will cut to the chase which is that quite simply I can’t go on with these two of me inside myself where the one that can’t live without you is always trying to choke the other one out and that other one which is my pregnant wife and kid is putting up a hell of a fight. I forget if I even told you that Peg’s pregnant. Well, she is._

_I don't expect you to ever forgive me. I hope you don’t. I wouldn’t deserve for you to, but I think you probably have, and if you haven’t, then you will, which is why I love you. You have the most unfathomable patience of which I have never deserved to be the object thereof. It is one of many very unfathomable things about you which I have been lucky to know and luckier to love and I think luckiest now to forget. How could I go on — you riddle me this, mister. How could I go on?_

_What you deserve is somebody much better than me who could give their whole heart to you without reservation. Purely selfishly I wish they could cut me in half and give a half to you but it would be less than half of what you deserve._

_These are all feeling like bullshit platitudes and I want only to hold you one more time or die in your arms. I love you! I love you! I love you! I’ll write it to the ends of the earth. Tomorrow it will and it won’t be. They will have gotten it out of my brain but it will live forever under cryogenic study. I don't know what they’ll do with it. Maybe they’ll use it to find the solution to all war and hatred. Ha ha._

_Let me shout it thrice more unto the breach. I love you. Hawk. You saved my life. I love you. You are worthy and deserving of love. All I have. More than I have. All the love on earth. More than I can give — so it has to be. I love you._

_Yours Forever,_

_Your B.J._

The bartender was watching him from a safe enough distance. It wasn't until he looked up that he realized he was crying. “Another one?” said the bartender, lifting the bottle she'd been steadily pouring his shots from for the past several hours. She was trying to keep a joviality to her voice but it was so late it was almost early and the place was nearly empty and he was a grown man in tears.

“Have you got an envelope and a stamp?”

She put the bottle down and went rummaging around the cash register, but when she surfaced with the requested materials she said, “Are you sure you should send that?”

“Not at all.”

“How about you sleep on it,” she suggested gently.

“I wish I could. But there isn’t time.”

He paid his tab and left a big tip and extra for the stamp. Then he went out into the street. He’d forgotten to wind his watch but he knew he was due at the V.A. hospital just after sunup, so he went down to the beach. On the way there he put the letter in the envelope and sealed and addressed it and licked the stamp and kissed the front of it and put it in the mailbox before he could think twice about it.

He regretted it almost instantly. But — this was the thing — in four hours or so, the regret would be gone. It would all be gone.

Peg had been upset. They had had a long talk about it in the kitchen after they had put Erin to bed. “I don’t think you should do it,” Peg had said. “I think it’s a cop-out.”

“I’ll always be a half-person if I don’t do it,” he told her.

“Jesus Christ. Why can’t you just go to therapy like a normal person — I guess like a woman would do?”

He put his head in his folded arms on the table. The truth was he had seen someone a couple times at the V.A., and they hadn’t been able to help with anything at all, mostly because he hadn’t really told them the half of it — how could he have? — and then they had recommended him for the experimental surgery.

“Honey,” Peg said, she was whispering now, and her little hand had wrapped his wrist, so that her wedding ring was cool against his cheek, “if you want to leave me for Hawkeye, I can't blame you. I just need to know sooner rather than later.”

“I don’t want to leave you,” he said into the nest of his hands.

“But you don't want to stay here either,” Peg said, “that much is abundantly obvious. I think you're choosing this so that you don’t have to choose for real. I think this is an act of emotional martyrdom. And I thought you were a man of principle.”

Sometimes Peg would really let you know she had majored in philosophy at Mills College. One of many reasons he truly did adore her. She’d chosen the life of a suburban housewife and stenographer out of love for him when she could have been some kind of brilliant academic. He knew he had to show he was worthy of her sacrifice by making his own. That was what marriage was about.

“Peg,” B.J. said, “I don’t want to feel like this anymore.”

“Like what?”

“Like someone’s cutting me in half with a handsaw.”

This process had started from the top of his head, from which point he often weathered searing migraines. One stroke deeper each and every day. He could feel it cut through bone, soft tissue, grey matter — nerves, organs, ribs. He didn’t sleep, except to dream.

“I don’t want to feel like this anymore either,” Peg said. “It’s killing me to see you like this.”

“What if it could all be over?” He looked up, studied her. She was staunchly refusing to cry. “What if it could? What would you say?”

Peg leant back in her chair, folding her arms over her belly. She had told him about the baby, almost regretfully, about a week previous. Many years later he would learn she had been on the pill, but something had gone wrong. “I would say it would be a lie,” she told him. “You’ll never change my mind on that. But it isn’t up to me. It’s your body — your mind. Your memories.”

“Peg — ”

“I want you to know you’re not doing this for me,” she said, getting up, straightening the tablecloth, “but I know you think you are.”

The sky was black and blue in pockets. And the ocean was so flat here that it seemed to come up the beach forever and ever and ever and ever until it lost gravity and the moon sloshed it back to the other end of this little bathtub, which was Japan, eventually. B.J. stopped in his tracks and tried to put his left foot back exactly in its previous print. He was so drunk he fell on his ass in the sand.

In Tokyo, Hawkeye had insisted that they go down to the Edo Bay. There was only so much time — they were supposed to be at some conference; he forgot what it was, because they hadn’t gone to a single lecture — and B.J., missing the redwoods, wanted to see trees that hadn’t half exploded, so they compromised and went to the Hamarikyu Gardens. They stood under the misshapen pines and watched the barges go by in the mouth of the Sumida, standing close to each other in the cold, sharing sips from Hawkeye's flask, which they’d filled with caramelly Japanese whiskey in the hotel room. “How long ago did we bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” B.J. asked.

Hawkeye looked at him with a little concern but they were both accustomed by now to morbid turns of conversation, not least from one another. B.J. knew already, pretty well by this point, that if you got Hawkeye drunk enough on the wrong stuff on the wrong day he would start reciting Wilfred Owen’s “Insensibility” with an air of theatrical terror. “That was August of 1945,” he said. “It hasn’t been eight years.”

“Jesus,” B.J. said. “What are we doing here?”

“Don’t ask me.”

“Why do we do these things,” B.J. asked nobody. “Why do we _keep_ doing these things? How does anybody stand us?”

“I don’t know if anybody does,” Hawkeye said. “As for the whys, well, they say a war — or a police action, as the case may be — let's just say, if empire is the sausage, war is how they make the sausage. Which would make us the protagonists of some or another muckraking novel by Upton Sinclair.”

B.J. put his head down on the metal stanchion between the elevated walkway and the frozen river.

“Don’t be acting distraught over that where anybody can see you,” Hawkeye told him. “They’ll hang you for being a communist.”

“They’re hanging for that now?”

“Maybe in every way but the literal.”

B.J. could feel a brain freeze coming on. “It’s true,” he said. “We put the meat in.”

Hawk gave him another few seconds before he winnowed his cold palm between B.J.’s forehead and the railing. “You’ll make yourself sick,” he said.

Maybe they were both thinking of the first day they met. He didn’t know Hawk’s mind, except that he did.

“Listen,” Hawk said, and his voice was close, and his breath, which was warm and smelled like burned sugar, “you can't go in there. Take it from me. Don’t go in there. I’ll never get you out.”

But you have before, B.J. thought about saying, as I’ve gotten you out before, haven’t I, and will again?

At first light he went back up the street to the bank of phone booths in front of the bar and called a cab, and he fell asleep in the backseat on the way to the hospital, such that the driver had to fully get out of the car and come around to shake him awake and get his wallet out of the pocket of his sandy jeans and no doubt tip himself substantially. He ended up insisting to the triage nurse in the E.R. that he had an appointment with such desperation that she sent for the emergency psych staff, who would have been pleased to see him were he not in such a sorry state.

They took him upstairs and sat him in the waiting room. Eventually the psychiatrist and the brain surgeon came out and whispered among themselves, gesturing argumentatively. At last the psychiatrist came over. “We can’t operate on you like this, Captain Hunnicutt. Go home and sober up and come back tomorrow morning.”

B.J. couldn’t help laughing at the doctors’ ludicrous naiveté. Margaret had called these kind of people R.E.M.F.’s — Rear Echelon Mother Fuckers. “I won’t be any soberer tomorrow morning,” he said.

“We can’t operate on a man with his belly full of gin!” the surgeon announced.

“Bourbon,” B.J. corrected. “Some cutter you are. My buddy operated on a guy with his belly full of English Breakfast. With cream and sugar!”

The doctors exchanged glances they probably thought B.J. was too drunk to interpret (they were right).

Next thing he knew there was a beautiful woman shaving half his head. Then the table. He hadn’t even had his appendix or his wisdom teeth out. It was almost funny to watch it all happen from this position, or otherwise soothing, or maybe he was just drunk. The nurses flitting around from station to station like moths at dusk, checking that everything was in its right place. And the surgeons bursting through the swinging doors with sanitized hands held aloft like Russian dancers. Orders and jargon and inside jokes and loaded looks exchanged across the room in graceful tennis volleys. The anesthesiologist wheeled a three-legged stool up beside his head, studied his chart, started fiddling with settings.

So it was real. It was really happening. It was about to happen. He had filled out the questionnaire; he knew what they would take. Who would begrudge him for going through it again before it was gone for good? Probably not even Peg, if she knew.

Select among those memories were worn out like track one of the collective Hunnicutt family vinyl copy of _Billie Holiday Sings_ , “Blue Moon,” which Peg had had on repeat herself while he was gone, and which B.J. would listen to sometimes after she had gone to bed, with headphones plugged into the turntable, head in hands. Somehow, it — the song, and the memory — still had the same feeling about the bones that were left of it. The whisper of the sound in the deep-worn ridges. Crackles, static, Tokyo, winter. They’d gone out to some backstreet izakaya and then they’d had room service bring up hot sake at three in the morning. What was the moon like that night? He didn’t know. He hadn’t been looking for it. They were kissing on the floor, and then Hawk got on the bed and watched him undress, not saying a word for possibly the first time in his life, just carefully watching, as though he were memorizing it on 8-mm film inside his head for later, and B.J. said, “Where do you want me,” and Hawk said, “Inside me, outside me, to the left of me, to the right of me, all around me, all the time…”

Afterward his head was on Hawk’s belly. Everything was quite still. He reflected on the recent realization that his life in this place had been composed of remarkable extremes. Twenty-four hours ago, they had been in surgery, where they were obliged to react emotionlessly to extreme violence. Whatever this was, it was about the exact opposite, though it was also a kind of complex production of bodies. He listened to the blood (O negative, he knew, from the times they were so incredibly bored and there was nothing else to read but one another’s dogtags) wash in and out of the other heart. Like this it sounded almost like the wind. Or the sea.

“You haven’t said anything in ten minutes,” he said eventually. He could hear his own voice echo inside his own head and inside Hawk’s ribs. “I think that’s a world record.”

“Hmm,” Hawk said. His hand was where he always liked to put it at B.J.’s forehead shifting his hair back from his face.

B.J. propped his chin up on his fist. “Is that all you got?”

Hawk pinched his ear. “I feel like you jabbed me with one of those battlefield morphine tubes. I can’t feel my legs.”

“You want me to move?”

“Absolutely never.”

B.J. put his head back down, targeting his ear against Hawk’s appendix scar like it was a helicopter landing pad. Then he started laughing.

“What is it?”

“How crude. _Jabbed you with a tube_. Listen, it was a lot more artful than that.”

Hawkeye kicked him. But he was laughing too. His palm was very warm against the back of B.J.’s neck and rough from being washed so often and ragged around the fingernails where he would scrub sometimes twenty minutes to get all the blood and filth out from underneath, even when nobody else could see anything there anymore. B.J. felt like another person. He’d come apart for a second and then the pieces went back together as if magnetized but some little chip that had always been in the wrong place had slotted into the right one.

“What’s wrong,” Hawk said, but he didn’t sound worried. He sounded sleepy. His heart was going like the kick drum in some doo-wop waltz. _My love must be a kind of blind love…_

“Nothing’s ever been more right,” B.J. said. “That’s what’s wrong.”

“Captain Hunnicutt, sir?”

He opened his eyes.

“Are you ready, sir?”

He nodded. The black mask descended. He breathed in, it was cold, smelled like dust. Consciousness applied the brakes to memory and reality alike. He thought he felt what happened next, which was that Hawk’s arms went around him even tighter, and B.J. could feel him thinking, but then they slept, and it snowed that night, so that the street was silent late into the morning… then nothing.

\--

At dawn, there were several ghostly persons wandering in the wreckage of the aid station on Hill 142. B.J. knew that one of these persons was Hawkeye, who had gotten through on the radio while everybody but Radar was in the OR. There was some or another code-named offensive on, so it had been a couple days of heavy shelling and wounded were pouring in from the ravaged countryside. After a while, B.J. had realized, halfway through resectioning some poor kid’s bowel, that it was likely that Hawkeye, and Margaret, who had gone with him, were dead. Of course this had happened before, and would happen again, but every time it felt like the world was ending. The black cloud started to close in and the floor started to drop, like a broken elevator that just kept falling. And then Radar came in near tears with relief.

The aid station had been hit in the middle of the night. It was light enough now for those still alive to discern that they had come under friendly fire. “It came right down on our heads,” said Margaret in the Jeep on the way home, as they headed up a caravan of buses of the surviving wounded. Hawkeye was being remarkably quiet, though he had said that he and Margaret had checked each other over for concussion symptoms, which was half innuendo and half S.O.P. All the dust had made their hair and faces even grayer than usual and their hands were cracked from rinsing them over and over in alcohol. There was so much blood on their clothing that it was impossible to tell if they were injured.

“We sure as hell are glad you two are alive,” B.J. said, hoping his voice sounded jovial rather than on the verge of breaking. “A cheer went up in the OR when we got you on the radio, Hawk.”

In his periphery B.J. could see Hawkeye looking at him in a way that simply could not be beheld head-on. He dared for a split second on a relatively pothole-free stretch of road and nearly combusted. Sometimes he wondered if Hawkeye knew what he was doing. A case might be made either way. He was an incorrigible flirt but he also liked to pretend he was illiterate in deeper emotions.

To wit, B.J. could have scripted what would happen next, like this whole thing was a sitcom written only in cliches, and indeed, Hawkeye pivoted into the Chaplinesque, as Hart Crane would have said: “If this is what being alive feels like,” he said, “I think I’ll try death.”

Margaret punched him in the shoulder. Next time they got her drunk — things were very different by that time — she would have a lot to say on this subject: _I pulled that corrugated tin off you, I was yelling your name… and you were just lying there… you stupid bastard!_

In camp, Hawk and Margaret went to clean up while everybody else unloaded and triaged the wounded, and then they appeared again in pre-op looking marginally tidier and incredibly exhausted, and then they all scrubbed up and operated for a couple hours. Around two in the afternoon, not that time had any meaning, Potter insisted that Hawk and B.J. go get a cup of coffee, but when they left the OR Hawk went straight for the supply tent and B.J. followed him.

“You alright?”

“Yeah — come here. Might need a hand.”

He sat on the edge of the shelf where Igor napped sometimes during his shift and rolled up the leg of his blood-spattered white scrubs and gingerly took his boot off over the strip of white gauze he’d tucked into his hideous sock. “You need me to get instruments?” B.J. asked him.

“No, I got everything out of it,” Hawkeye said, unwrapping the gauze, which had gone yellow and red and was sticking to him. “But you might have to do a couple of sutures.”

It wasn’t even worth asking why he hadn’t said anything before. B.J. went and got silk and a needle and a pair of gloves. By the time he had got everything together Hawkeye had finished unpacking all the bloody gauze he’d shoved into the wound. It was big and ugly and deep but clean and it hadn’t hit or broken anything of much importance. “How’s the pain,” B.J. asked.

Hawkeye shrugged. “Bad,” he said.

“You want a local?”

“Yeah, desperately, but if I let you do it I won’t be able to go back to operating for a couple hours.”

“Hawk, I think we’ve got it from here,“ B.J. lied.

“It’s numb anyway,” Hawkeye said. He was half asleep, his eyes were closed. “I can handle it, it’s alright.”

B.J. didn’t believe him, so he ignored all of this and gave him the local anyway. “Bastard,” Hawkeye yawned.

He fell asleep. B.J. sat cross-legged on the floor at his feet and held his calf in his lap and flushed the wound again and administered fifteen stitches, feeling the muscle in Hawk’s leg jerk against his hand, though not as much as it would have if he were awake and not anesthetized. There were a bunch of smooth scars circling his ankle that B.J. eventually realized must have been from mosquito bites. The entire little operation took maybe fifteen minutes, by which time Frank was in a snit and Potter was wondering where they were, and Hawk woke up when Kellye came in the door looking for them, as B.J. was binding the wound in gauze, fighting a funny urge to kiss it very gently on the hurt place, the way he might have for his daughter. Hawk went to the Swamp — Kellye said later that she mostly carried him — and slept for two hours and reappeared limping in post-op against direct orders. B.J. operated until nightfall and then fell asleep at the table in the mess tent and woke up when Klinger arrived as a vision in yellow satin, flashlight held aloft in the pitch darkness, to tell him that everybody was going to Rosie’s.

It was raining hard the next time the PA summoned them to pre-op. Hawkeye was already there, hair wet, coffee mug at hand, washing his hands like he was trying to get a layer of skin off.

“Hawk,” B.J. said. He looked through the foggy window in the swinging doors. Maybe they had forty-five seconds. “Listen.”

“My heart’s been racing all night,” Hawkeye said, trying for nonchalant. “Go ahead, feel it.”

B.J. put his hand into the sink and slid two fingers around Hawkeye’s soapy wrist and felt the pulse running and running and running like chopper blades or machine gun fire far away. He tried to pass off the shiver that went through him as a kind of wiggly stretch. Then he put the other faucet on and started washing his own hands. “I thought you might go find a nurse,” he said.

“No. I went and found a cold shower.”

Maybe four hours previous they had followed each other out of Rosie’s, drunk, Hawkeye having been all night limping and balancing himself against B.J. even when he was sitting down, laughing and veering into each other by purposeful accident.

A few minutes of drunken babbling had ensued, to the effect of: 

“I don’t know what I would’ve done if you’d been dead up there.”

“Well I couldn’t’ve died because — I just couldn’t’ve.”

“Why not?”

“You would’ve got on just fine if I was dead up there.”

“I would’ve keeled right over in the dirt.”

“How do you know?”

“Cause I damn near did it in surgery!”

It was really not funny at all, but, you know, war. They laughed loudly enough to have woken half the camp were they not all at Rosie’s still.

“I was so glad to see you it felt like the war was over,” Hawk said.

“Whenever you’re not here,” B.J. agreed, giggling, “I feel like I’m staggering in the dark.”

Hawkeye laughed so hard he overbalanced on his hurt leg and nearly fell. So B.J. steadied him by the lapels of the ratty burgundy robe. “We’re staggering in the dark right now,” Hawkeye said.

Their faces were so very close that B.J. felt when he gave something up. He was too drunk to even tell what it was but he could feel it when Hawkeye gave it to him. Until that moment, B.J. had had somewhat of a speech prepared. He was going to say something like, _but when we’re together, we're going somewhere. I don't feel blind. I know there’s an end to this. I know there’s a world beyond_. But instead he put his mouth against Hawk's mouth.

They had ended up fiercely making out in the darkness behind the officer’s club like a couple of teenagers after the hop, but then Hawk had put his thigh between B.J.’s legs and it was like a bucket of cold water had been upended over him and the powerful suffocating rightness of the moment and the way Hawk tasted and his rough clothes and stubble and all of it went sour real quick, like milk left out. B.J. had gone back to the Swamp, where he had lain there and felt his heartbeat shake the cot until he heard choppers.

Of course this had been going to happen for a little while now. It was like how you always knew the war was there, over the northern rise. It had especially been going to happen since the relief that washed over B.J. when Radar had come in to say Hawk was alive had felt like such a weight of mortal coil had been lifted from his shoulders that he could float off the ground… But now it had happened, and here they were. He understood new levels of meaning in the phrase _the cold light of day_.

“Why,” B.J. said at the sink, knowing he wouldn’t like the answer.

“Because I want you.”

Later he would fiercely regret saying this, because he knew even then that it wasn't really true: “You want everybody.”

“Not like I want you,” said Hawk, and then Potter was coming in the door. Twenty hours later — they had missed an entire day, so that it was dark again, and were running on three hours of sleep from several days previous, plus some orange juice, the thin mud that passed for coffee around here, and a hangover — it happened again in the colonel’s office, even though Radar was asleep on the other side of the door, so they were obliged to be very quiet, and only one of the horse pictures fell off the wall and broke, which they later successfully chalked up to having gone in search of the booze in the dark.

When B.J. could think straight, which was rarely, he wondered what he could possibly tell Peg. He sat on the edge of his cot and tried to write to her and felt Hawk watch him struggling. Peg for her part seemed to understand things about as well as he did or better, and in the seventies Hawk would show him a letter — also tucked into the back cover of _A Farewell to Arms_ — that she had written in the autumn of 1966 alerting him that B.J. planned to take the 10:00AM ferry to Monhegan from Port Clyde on October the 26, and another from 1952, where she wrote, _please don’t show this to B.J., but because I am praying for his heart, I am praying for your heart too…_

“What did you mean,” B.J. said, sometime in the ballpark of the following evening — they had eschewed sleeping in favor of convincing and cajoling and bribing and bargaining and otherwise recruiting everybody who was conscious in post-op to spontaneously start speaking in gibberish in the presence of Frank Burns — while they were in the Jeep en route to the nearest evac hospital to beg for supplies, covered in blood still, because there was no time, “not like you want me?”

“I mean I love you,” Hawk said, in the same matter of fact way he might have asked a nurse for a sponge. He seemed resigned to it.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Even when I hate you I love you.”

“When do you ever hate me?”

“When you do something that makes me love you too much. Like today when Frank called you a communist dupe and you called him daddy MacArthur’s special boy in pig Latin.”

B.J. felt his ears get hot. “Well if I’d known what it would do to you I’d just’ve called him a rat fink like usual.”

“Never mind,” said Hawk. “You don’t have to do anything about it at all. You’re a married man; I’m capable of tremendous acts of repression. And it broke you enough when you cheated with a woman.”

“Don’t do that,” B.J. said, so that he would not have to face the dawning realization that he had not yet, to date, been visited by The Guilts. Not behind the officer’s club, or in Potter’s office, or in the Swamp after having successfully put Frank in a tizzy, et cetera.

“Do what!”

“Hawk, if you go around behaving like you’re incapable of being loved, you’ll make it true.”

A shell hit the ground and burst on their right flank, off B.J.’s elbow, and they ducked into each other as the Jeep flew through a cloud of acrid smoke.

“Don’t try to talk me out of what I’m about to say,” B.J. went on, half yelling over the echo of the explosion, trying to head whatever Hawk was going to say off at the pass. “Peg would call that a paternalistic attitude.”

Hawk risked a caustic glare in his direction and then fixed his gaze again on the ragged road.

“Sometimes you make me feel insane,” B.J. said.

“That’s your great romantic confession!”

“That isn’t what I — come on! Sometimes I feel like nothing’s real except for you. If this is hell, you must be Virgil.”

At the evac they loaded the truck with supplies, and when they got back on the road home again it was dusk, the moon was full, and the wind in the trees was cold. It would have been very beautiful were they not in mortal danger.

“This place, this job, this war — ” Hawk went into one of his celebrated tirades — “it’s basically designed to fuck with you mentally. That’s what Sidney keeps telling me. We spend day in and day out seeing how human bodies aren’t meant to survive this kind of violence. And that does something to the mind. All those chemicals — I never paid any attention when we talked about hormones — what I mean is, a person can’t help but look for whatever it’ll take to feel anything besides death.”

Far away B.J. could hear the shelling start again. “Is that what you think this is,” he said.

“Maybe that’s what it is for you.”

“It’s not.”

“How do you know?”

“As well as you know. Don’t you trust me?”

“With my life,” Hawk said.

“And I you. Will you stop this car?”

They could have died — they could have gotten a priceless quantity of medical supplies destroyed — but recent events had them feeling invincible, so Hawk pulled over and cut the engine and they climbed into the ditch between the body of the Jeep and the cliff at the edge of the road and made the clumsiest love ever made for twenty minutes, and then they went home, into the OR, scrubbed, sanitized, operated for ten hours, then bed, then sleep, at last, and they had the same dreams.

\--

When B.J. woke up, his head hurt. The fire was ashes and the morning light was dancing on the floor. He was half asleep and still remembering where he was when he heard the kitchen door open and close, and he knew who the person was that came in badly whistling the riff from “Day Tripper.” This person would be taking off his rain mac and galoshes and then he would put coffee on and read the paper and eventually he would come in and put his cold hands under B.J.’s shirt and say something like _c’mon, up, you big lug…_ Maybe they were drinking too much these days, judging by the headache, acid stomach, fuzzy tongue, the general odor of juniper and rubbing alcohol and ash, but it had happened before, and it would again, so everybody said, but they had come out of it okay, time and again. He thought he dreamed. Jazz on the public radio. He went into another life wherein he was certain that when he opened his eyes he would see that their raincoats were hung next to each other on the row of hooks by the kitchen door. But then he woke up for real, staring at the stucco ceiling, feeling like death on a soda cracker, and it all went away again, except for the jazz on the radio.

In the kitchen, when he eventually managed to make his way there mostly by touch, B.J. found Hawk at the table, dressed, with coffee, reading a slim paperback novel with a bright cover. “Good morning,” Hawk said.

“Is it?”

B.J. put the faucet on cold and splashed his face a few times, and when he opened his eyes he saw the sink was full of lobsters. He might have screamed. He certainly jumped a few feet in the air. The lobsters were a deep red-blue, blindly scrambling their way over each other in the clear water. Behind him he heard Hawk trying to pretend he wasn’t laughing.

“I’ve never seen them alive before outside of pictures,” B.J. said, fairly collapsing in the chair across from Hawk at the kitchen table. “Holy hell. I’ve only ever seen them cooked.”

“They’re about to be,” Hawk said.

“Where did they even come from?”

“I went out to check that the storm didn’t wreck my trap. They were all hanging out in there. It must be the place to be. You want some coffee?” He poured the mug in front of B.J. full without being told. “It’s a beautiful day.”

“How do you have your head on straight?”

Hawk smiled. It would take him another little while longer to say out loud that he was an alcoholic. “Coffee helps,” he said.

“What time is it?”

“Just after ten.”

B.J.’s flight back across the continent left in the early evening from the tiny jetport in Portland, three hours’ drive south. “Is the ferry running again?”

“That boat’s been one bad storm away from a total loss my entire life, but, shockingly, yes. The next one’s at 11:15.”

“I should probably be on it.”

His rental car was parked at the inn in Port Clyde he’d wholly intended to stay at the previous night. He hoped they hadn’t assumed him lost at sea and called Peg at home, though that might have been easier than it was going to be to have to explain to her what had actually happened.

“Time enough for eggs,” Hawk said, getting up, flicking on the burner under the beat-up cast iron skillet on the stove.

“Eggs,” B.J. echoed.

“They come out of chickens… ringing any bells?”

“You want to make me eggs?”

“Sunny side up, right?”

B.J. put his head down on the table and arranged his arms protectively over his aching skull the way he had done as a child in the earthquake drills. “You don’t have to do that,” he said.

“It’s the least I can do for poisoning you,” Hawk said. He flicked B.J.’s ear. “Anything alive in there?”

“I don’t know,” B.J. managed. He felt like he’d broken in the back of his own skull and shoveled sticky tar inside. He just lay there for a while, feeling like a rag doll, and listened to the symphony of domestic movement. The eggs cracking and sizzling in the skillet, the sink running, feet on the tile, cabinets opening and closing…

When he had gotten home at first, he thought he remembered — those days were only partially intact — he had done a lot of this. Just listening. Listening to the dishwasher and the wind. Listening to Peg ironing in the morning. Sitting on the porch drinking, listening to the neighbor listening to the radio. It had been like listening to a symphony with a single instrument missing. He thought he remembered telling the army psychiatrist something along those lines, and the doctor had said, well, how do you know an instrument is missing? What if it's just unfinished?

His head was coaxed up by the sound of a plate on the table. The egg was so perfect it looked like a lady’s hat as painted by Piet Mondrian. Around it two triangles of singed toast were arranged like a cat’s ears. “Aspirin first,” Hawk said, putting two of the little white pills in B.J.’s palm.

“I don’t understand,” B.J. said. “Don’t you hate me?”

“Don’t you know how many times I wished I could make you breakfast?”

B.J. couldn’t argue in this condition. He couldn’t even gather the crux of the argument he later thought he probably should have made, which was, do you really think it serves either of us to play house like this? Isn't it just the kind of impossible temptation which should be avoided at all costs? He was too hungover and tender to deny himself this indulgence, so he swallowed the aspirin and broke the trembling yolk with the toast’s sharpest corner. Yellow as a kindergartener’s impression of the sun. Across the table, Hawk turned back to his chipped mug of cold coffee and his paperback novel, stretching his long legs and holey socks out across the tattered linoleum.

“What are you reading?” B.J. asked him.

Hawk showed him the cover. It was _One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest_ by Ken Kesey. “It's good,” he said. “Some of those Beats can really write, you know. And I can speak to its accuracy, to some extent.”

B.J. hadn’t read the novel, but he knew it took place in a mental institution. “What do you mean?”

Hawk made a face. “It’s so strange,” he said. “I hated that you had to — but now it’s funny that you don’t know.”

“I don’t know what?”

“I’m not telling you while you’re this hungover.”

“I did this to myself,” B.J. said. “I never drink like that.”

“You never drink like that, that you can remember,” Hawk corrected. “And you’ve got to eat unless you want to spend that entire ferry ride puking over the gunwale.”

“I feel like that's gonna happen anyway.”

“Not if you eat.” He folded his page over in the book and put it back in the pocket of his coat. “I’ll watch you take every bite,” he warned.

“I never got to this chapter in _Are You My Mother._ ”

“It comes after the part where he describes dunking the madeleine cookie in the cup of tea,” Hawkeye said. “Eat your breakfast.”

The radio played something from Bill Evans at the Village Vanguard. White gulls wheeling in the window like paper airplanes and beyond them the sun wobbling like a sheet of silver mercury against the sea. Hawk watched his hands. B.J. could feel him thinking. If there wasn’t such a fog in his mind he thought he probably could have figured out what it was. By ten to, by the clock on the stove, he was finished eating and marginally more clear-headed, and the dishes were clean, the lobsters seemed to have begun to understand their forthcoming fate, judging by their wary stillness, and he was getting his sneakers on with some difficulty when Hawk came back down from upstairs in his boots and a red wool coat.

B.J. remembered a suggestion of something. It was like remembering that a memory existed. He grasped for it like a child having let go of a helium balloon.

"Did you have that red coat?"

"Over there? No, my dad was wearing it out here while I was over there. Why?"

"It — you know. Like I said. Remembering a dream."

"I used to have this red bathrobe that I would pretend was a smoking jacket."

"That must be it."

"You were always asking to borrow it," Hawk said. “Then you were always trying to get me out of it.”

B.J. felt like someone had cracked an egg against the back of his neck.

“You had this blue robe that was too short,” Hawk went on, almost gleefully, except he wouldn’t quite meet B.J.’s eye, "and you had everybody in camp wanting to lick your knees… but come on. We’re gonna miss the boat.”

They went out together into the bright day. Bright as a knife through the eyeball. The sky was like a dictionary definition of blue and the sea one shade deeper off the same pitch and the inhospitable rock upon which they were perched in this azure fishbowl had been washed clean by the long night and the lashing rain. There was a stiff, cool breeze. The sun was high, white, and cold. Hawk’s coat was a red mar, like a burst pen.

He turned around in the driveway. “Are you coming,” he said.

B.J. realized he hadn’t left the porch. He went bewilderedly down the steps and followed Hawk up the long driveway toward the road. Every step sent a cold iron bolt up through his heel along his spine into his brain.

“Well,” Hawk said, “do you feel like you got the message?”

In this light his eyes were so blue B.J. wondered how he ever could have thought they were more grey. “I think I did,” he said.

“And…”

“I don’t know what it means,” B.J. told him, “not yet.”

He realized what it meant that night in the airport, as soon as his hangover had worn off enough to permit full functioning of his brain, and then he didn’t sleep the whole flight home thinking about it, and then it was another couple years before he got up the chutzpah to tell Peg about it, only to find that she already knew. In that interceding period he wrote Hawkeye sometimes, and they sent each other vinyl records, and twice a year, usually around Memorial Day and later around Christmas, they spoke on the phone. The next time he came out to Monhegan was in the summer of the year 1970, by which time he was divorced and Erin was going into her second year in the pre-med program at Bowdoin. He said it was just because Hawk was turning fifty, but there was a lot that happened other than the party. Anyway, it took a while. That was what Hawk was always saying: It took you long enough!

But right then and there it felt like his brain was full of cotton. “I only know I’m sorry,” he said.

“Don’t be sorry,” Hawk told him, even though his face was a little sour. “I can’t blame you for it, at the end of the day.”

“You can’t?”

“I never could be mad at you for very long. It’s one of my myriad personal failings.”

B.J. pinched the sleeve of Hawk’s red coat. It was somewhat more appropriate than wrapping his fingers around Hawk’s wrist, which was what he wanted to do. “That's the self-flagellation talking,” he said.

Hawk tapped his nose. “You don't really know me,” he said. “I must seem like a good person to you.”

“I know you.”

“I thought you said — ”

“But I know you.”

They turned a bend in the road so that the lowlands of the island rolled out beneath them, houses and barns and boats in drydock and the rutted gravel road and the verdant lawn of the cemetery and all the temporary death of the fields and trees spilling like a thrown-out blanket toward the harbor and the sea. A spill of colors inside an agate — a rash of vivid ochres. Van Gogh’s irises to the tenth power.

This was just like him: Hawk could not let a good thing be. “But — ”

“Don’t say a word,” said B.J. “Just believe me. Did you ever read Dante’s _Divine Comedy_?”

Hawk let loose that terrific cackle with such energetic fervor that B.J. thought he might spontaneously immolate. When he had sufficiently recovered he patted B.J.’s back affectionately between the shoulderblades, where he had not realized he was tense, and they set off again together down the hill toward the harbor. The place had transformed under such clean light. On their way, a handful of those ragged salty type people stopped Hawk to ask him questions of a semi-medical nature. Sciatica’s acting up. The baby has a funny rash. Buster stepped barefoot on a piece of broken glass. Listen, how about you just come over for dinner on Thursday. And who’s your friend? Laura said she saw you two yesterday around the backshore…

“I thought you must have been lonely out here,” B.J. said as they continued on downhill after Hawk had made assorted promises and assurances and explanations.

“There are different kinds of lonely,” Hawk said. “You can be lonely without being alone.”

You don't need to tell me, B.J. thought.

The boat was already pulled in and loading by the time they got down to the dock. “I don’t have a ticket,” B.J. remembered, bewilderedly patting his pockets.

“You don’t need one on the way back. You just get on.”

“I just get on?”

“It’s 11:14,” Hawk said, “you should probably get on.”

B.J. waited. He didn’t know what he was waiting for. Finally he said, “That's it?”

“We already had a really good one,” Hawk told him, laughing. “You want me to go through all the nonsense again? When we just met? Just get on the boat, Beej.”

“But will we see each other again?”

Hawk smiled a kind of gentle and forgiving smile that promised nothing. It was the smile he probably gave people when he told them they were going to be okay. “Tomorrow never knows,” he said.

They shook hands. “Goodbye,” said B.J.

“Goodbye. Get back safe.”

And that was it. Of course that was it. B.J. felt like he was sleepwalking. He got on the boat and the captain blew the horn and the deckhands slipped the heavy waterlogged lines from the moorings on the dock. He sat on one of the low benches and felt the cold sun start to melt him. Then, through the cool wind and the hangover and the salt, fate, history, hauntedness, he felt something twinge.

The thread had always been there, B.J. realized. He had simply never recognized it before. There was a very tight knot on the end of a very long skein which had been reeled in and neatly coiled in glimmering loops and now he could feel it unreeling and unravelling inside his chest as the ferry pulled out into the harbor. It was neither a comfortable nor uncomfortable feeling. Eventually B.J. realized that it was almost that he felt like crying, but this urge was coming from somewhere inside himself that he had never been to before, such that it could hardly be understood for what it was.

He watched Hawkeye’s red coat as he walked up the pier toward the road, but instead of heading back south toward Crabapple Cove he climbed down off the gravel path and onto the rocks above the tide line, negotiating piles of seaweed and dislodged lobster buoys and garbage and other miscellaneous flotsam that had been thrown up against the coast in the storm. Hawk followed the ferry until it left the no-wake zone in the harbor and put the engines on, and the sea churned up and the island fell away, at which point he stopped and raised his hand, lifting two fingers to show a peace sign. B.J. returned the gesture until Hawk could hardly be seen except as a flash of color against an endless field of blue and gray, like a strange flag.

As the island disappeared into a smudge at the horizon B.J. understood that he was going to go back to California and bear it as he had always done, even when he hadn’t known he was doing it. But in the little cabin he could hear the captain listening to the radio:

_Listen to the color of your dreams, it is not living  
_ _Or play the game existence to the end of the beginning…_

_\---_

_\--_

_-_

**Author's Note:**

> i am choosing to live dangerously and publish this when i'm only midway through season eight, so please forgive me any inconsistencies with Later Canon. this is inspired entirely by one line of B.J.'s from season 4's "the interview" - "i'm torn between the love i have for these people and wanting that relationship to continue, and erasing every memory of this place." 
> 
> this story is named of course after [the beatles song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHNbHn3i9S4). it is a tribute to my aunt, who i hope will never read it, who got me into mash this summer and loves the beatles and lives on an island in maine, though not this one. andrew wyeth lived on monhegan for a time. [here's one of his paintings](https://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/post/627099234795208704/artfortheages-squall-andrew-wyeth) that is related to this story. 
> 
> other points of reference include:   
> [the dangerous year](https://mouth-rainboy.tumblr.com/post/155745212748/john-berryman-the-dangerous-year-1939-from) by john berryman  
> [insensibility](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57258/insensibility) by wilfred owen  
> [graves](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42608/graves-56d22137612a6) by hayden carruth  
> [chaplinesque](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43257/chaplinesque) by hart crane


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